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Month: July 2024

The Art Of The Dog Whistle

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 24, 2024

Y’all misogynists don’t act racist

Team MAGA was on its back foot for a couple of days after President Joe Biden on Sunday dropped out of the presidential race and passed the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris. Republican attack lines prepared for one old white guy against another old white guy would need reworking to smear the daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father.

Donald Trump will not be able to hold his tongue, of course. He never has. But his MAGA cultists never quite mastered the art of the dog whistle (CNN):

In an interview with CNN’s Manu Raju Monday, Tennessee Republican Rep. Tim Burchett suggested President Joe Biden selected Harris as his running mate solely because she is Black: “One hundred percent she is a DEI hire,” he said, referring to diversity, equity and inclusion. “Her record is abysmal at best.”

DEI is how one now utters the N-word if one is a Republican congressman from Knoxville. Or anyone else in the MAGA movement. (Expect Alexandra Petri and Andy Borowitz to have great fun at the GOP’s expense.)

Post by @borowitzreport
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On that subject, the Associate Press reports:

Republican leaders are warning party members against using overtly racist and sexist attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris, as they and former President Donald Trump ‘s campaign scramble to adjust to the reality of a new Democratic rival less than four months before Election Day.

“This election will be about policies and not personalities,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told reporters after a Tuesday closed-door meeting with his caucus. The race is nothing personal, “and her ethnicity or her gender have nothing to do with this whatsoever.”

Johnson’s caucus and right-wing media are off to a rocky start.

“The right-wing media machine is throwing everything but the kitchen sink at Kamala Harris,” writes Oliver Darcy in CNN’s Reliable Sources newsletter:

Over the last 48 hours, Harris has been derided as a radical California liberal; she has been smeared as a “DEI” candidate; she has been denigrated as a “mistress” for her previous relationship with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, even though it occurred after Brown was separated from his wife and was not a secret; she has been ridiculed for her laugh and described as unlikeable; she has been characterized as having been too tough on crime as a prosecutor, but also pro-illegal immigration; she has had her candidacy labeled a “coup”; and she has been subjected to commentators mocking even the pronunciation of her name, among other things.

[…]

“Suddenly she’s the next messiah?” Fox News host Jesse Watters said Tuesday night as he railed against Harris. “The only reason she is in the White House is because of the DEI deal Biden cut with Bernie [Sanders] to seal the nomination.”

The salvo is a page out of the right’s playbook targeting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, a bogeyman it has used to blame for everything from airline safety issues to the Baltimore bridge collapse.

Ask Baltimore’s Brandon Scott. After the Key Bridge collapse in March, social media posts labeled the Black mayor of the majority nonwhite city a “DEI Mayor”:

“We know what these folks really want to say when they say DEI mayor,” he told The Banner. “Whether it is DEI or clown. They really want to say the N-word. But there is nothing they can do and say to me that is worse than the treatment of my ancestors. I am proud of who I am and where I come from.”

Sexist and ethnic slurs are not the only weapons in the MAGA arsenal. Harris can expect a flurry of meritless legal challenges. Election law expert Rick Hasen on Monday addressed some early ones at Slate.

The Guardian reports that Team Trump on Tuesday filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) over Harris changing the name of the Biden-Harris campaign:

The complaint, filed by the Trump campaign’s general counsel, David Warrington, argued that the Biden campaign could not rename its committee from “Biden for President” to “Harris for President” once Biden dropped out of the race on Sunday, and roll over $91m.

“This is little more than a thinly veiled $91.5m excessive contribution from one presidential candidate to another, that is, from Joe Biden’s old campaign to Kamala Harris’s new campaign. This effort makes a mockery of our campaign finance laws,” the eight-page complaint said.

The reenergized Democratic campaign for president has now pulled even with Trump in new polls. The Trump campaign means to throw sand in the gears:

Whether the complaint generates traction with the FEC remains unclear, but the Trump campaign has been looking for any way to slow down the momentum Harris has been able to generate with voters and donors after she quickly became the presumptive Democratic nominee.

The strategy, according to people familiar with the matter, has included opening new legal battles to try to prevent Harris from accessing Biden’s funds, although the complaint on Tuesday stopped short of a lawsuit.

Election lawyers at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center counter that “because Biden and Harris share a campaign committee, the Vice President and her running mate can continue using the campaign’s existing funds for the general election if she is on the Democratic ticket as either the presidential or vice-presidential nominee.”

Hasen believes that this Trump complaint too is headed nowhere and will take months to arrive. But that’s not the point. The GOP is in spaghetti-flinging mode for now, hoping to find a line of attack against Harris that sticks. This filing, Hasen explains, “gives Trump legal fodder to say that Harris engaged in a greater campaign finance violation than the one that formed the basis for turning his NY business records misdemeanors into felonies.”

Yes, but what Trump is really looking for is a 2024 version of “but her emails” that doesn’t scream the N-word.

https://x.com/JoshRultNews/status/1815857063819456850

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It’s Always Something

Published by digby on July 23, 2024

Josh Marshall notes that even though the Democrats are now hugely enthused about the election, the naysayers who wanted Biden to drop out are still unhappy:

[A]lready we’re hearing that this rush of support for Harris is yet another bad thing. Democrats have only just changed the last terrible thing pundits said they were doing only to be told that their solution is also a disaster in the making or at least a mistake. I don’t want to pick on anyone but this piece by Graeme Wood seems to capture this whole new storyline. In a way the argument is just a continuation of the Thunderdome craze of the last six months: a contested convention, blitz primaries, and the like. The new terrible mistake is rallying around Kamala Harris too quickly. Because this just compounds what Wood and seemingly many other pundits and columnists feel is the belief that “Democratic politics felt like a game rigged by insiders to favor a candidate of their choice, and to isolate that candidate from the risk associated with campaigning.”

I wish I understood this reflex to stomp all over Democratic hopes from pundits who claim to be liberals. And why they want this Mad Max run to the convention I will never understand. It just makes no sense to me that they are determined to turn the process into a circus when Orange Hitler is on the ballot. Luckily it looks like Harris will have enough delegates pledged to her before the early virtual vote on August 7th so this will soon be put to rest.

As Marshall says:

The point is that it’s what Democrats really seem to want – even those who were bitterly opposed to seeing Biden pushed off the ticket and most who might have had questions about Harris as a candidate. What a political community actually seems to want, expressed through the mechanisms of the political process, somehow isn’t quite good enough for these commentators. They are demanding that they slow down, compel a few rising star governors to declare their candidacies and duke it out for a month. They’re in love with forms and visual contests and look on actual politics when it presents itself with something that looks a lot like contempt.

[…]

[B]eneath this seeming appetite to let politics run its course in all its ferality is something quite different: It’s a kind of disdain for actual voters and how actual politics works – not always pretty, mixed with peoples overweening ambitions, their intense loves and fears, and all the rest. If Democrats want to get behind Kamala Harris, stop fighting with each other, stop watching the unmerited pain of an aging leader most of them respect and even love, and get on to running a campaign against a menacing adversary … well, that’s just fine. They don’t have anything to prove to folks who write for a living.

Tracking Your Periods

Published by digby on July 23, 2024

Did you know about this? It’s outrageous. But I think they’re quite serious. Or at least JD Vance is, and there is a very good reason to believe he will be president if they win the election in November, either in the next term if Trump finally collapses or the one beyond. (If you think elections will still be operative at that point you’re dreaming.)

Josh Marshall has the story:

This spring, HHS finalized new regulations under HIPAA to limit law enforcement access to medical records tied to reproductive health. The rule was first proposed in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision as a way to limit the ability of state and local law enforcement agencies to access medical records to stymie or criminalize access to legal reproductive health services, most specifically abortions, but not only abortions. It also applies to contraception and the full range of other endangered reproductive care.

So for instance, consider the ability of a woman from an abortion-ban state to travel to another state to get a legal abortion, or her ability to receive legal abortion drugs through the mail. The news has been filled with proposed or actual laws which would attempt to restrict travel to receive abortions in other states, charge those who travel or criminalize those who might facilitate such travel or facilitate the legal shipment of prescribed abortion drugs through the mail. Of course, local police agencies might simply take it upon themselves to pull records to see who had unexplained disruptions to their menstrual cycles.

Your local sheriff might just want to know.

And so does JD Vance, it turns out.

But to enforce these laws or know when there’s something to enforce you really need access to medical records. You need to know and be able to prove when a woman was pregnant and then, before the end of normal gestation, stopped being pregnant. So if you live in Texas and you’re pregnant, can you go to your OB-GYN or will that be held against you if you’re found to have ceased being pregnant after a visit to Kansas? Does your OB have to report you to law enforcement if they believe there’s a real and present risk that you’ll go out of state to get an abortion or seek a prescription from an out of state doctor for mifepristone? And what about contraception, which some states are now also making moves to limit? Or how about IVF? This was the context of the HHS rule which was proposed in spring of 2023 and came into effect this spring. It applies to all of those questions.

Now when this rule was first proposed back in 2023, a group of 28 members of Congress wrote to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra demanding he withdraw the proposed rule “immediately.” (I was reminded of this letter when I saw this write up this morning.) They argued that the proposed rule “unlawfully thwarts the enforcement of compassionate laws” and “creates special protections for abortion that limit cooperation with law enforcement, undermine the ability to report abuse, restrict the provision of public health information … erase the humanity of unborn children” and “interfere with valid state laws protecting life.”

Now, I said 28 members of Congress. That’s not very many. You’ll remember there are 535 of them, or which 100 are senators. Vance was one of only eight Republican senators willing to go this hard for menstrual surveillance by state law enforcement agencies. The other 20 signatories are members of the House and a quick review of the names shows they are mostly hardcore Freedom Caucus types. But think about it: even in the House GOP caucus, they could only get 20 people to sign this thing. That’s how extreme it is. But JD Vance signed.

I don’t know what Vance really believes and judging from his abrupt change of beliefs in the last few years, I suspect he doesn’t believe in much. But this interview with his college roommate was very interesting. He thinks Vance is a very, very angry guy filled with resentment. And it’s pretty clear from his rhetoric that his anger is directed largely at women.

He’s a very dangerous man.

Just Clap…

Published by digby on July 23, 2024

That was a very bad speech. It turns out he’s not very good at this. Imagine that.

I wrote the other day that Trump made a mistake in picking him, largely because he thought he had it in the bag and was listening to his offspring, Tweedle dee and Tweedle dumb. But I assumed he was at least competent as a MAGA politician. But I guess that was wrong…

In Case You Were Wondering About Those GOP Threats

Published by digby on July 23, 2024

They are threatening to file all kinds of lawsuits to contest dropping Biden from the ballot. Of course, Biden isn’t on the ballot because there is no ballot yet. And what are they talking about? People drop out of races all the time!

Election expert Rich Hasen explains why they are full of it legally:

With news of President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race, some Republicans are claiming he cannot be removed from the presidential ballot in November and that in any case it is undemocratic to do so. The first claim is legally unsupported and the second one is ludicrous. I fully expect the Democrats’ legitimate nominees for president and vice president to be listed on the ballot in November.

Let’s start with the legal issue. The premise of the argument that Biden cannot be “removed” from the ballot is that he’s already “on” the ballot for president. He’s not.

When it comes to which candidates are listed on the general election ballot for president, states set their own rules. Typically, the rules provide that after each recognized political party has had its convention or otherwise gone through its process of choosing a nominee, the party must transmit that information to the states by a certain date so that ballots and other election materials can be prepared.The video player is currently playing an ad.00:11Skip Ad

Joe Biden has not yet been nominated to be president even though he had racked up enough delegates at the upcoming Democratic National Convention to have had an easy time getting the official nomination had he stayed in the race. He was only the presumptive nominee, not the official nominee—nobody is, until there’s a vote. So Biden need not be replaced, because he was never the official candidate.

To the extent that there’s even the hint of a legal issue, it’s not over whether it’s Biden or someone else who is the Democrats’ nominee, but about the timing of choosing the official nominee. The key is that nomination happens in time to get the candidate on the ballot in each state. For instance, Ohio originally had a ballot deadline that was before the Democratic National Convention, leading to a risk that no Democratic nominee would be listed on the ballot in that state. Ohio changed its law to a later deadline to accommodate the late convention. As I explained at Election Law Blog, there’s a hypertechnical argument that Ohio could still contend that a nomination coming from Democrats after their convention would be too late. This was the purported reason Democrats were going to do an early virtual roll-call vote to choose Biden. (I think the real reason for an early roll call was for partisans to lock Biden in, not to avoid litigation.)

Any litigation to keep Biden off the Ohio ballot would be extremely unlikely to succeed because Ohio has committed to the later date and transmitted that later date to local election officials. Everyone is relying on that and so Ohio would not be able to just change its mind, any more than any other Republican state could try to retroactively change the ballot access rules. Further, courts generally hold that states can’t make it too hard for serious candidates to get a place on the ballot, and that rule would easily apply to the eventual Democratic Party nominee.

In a handful of other states, including Washington state, there is a different ballot access timing issue that could trigger a lawsuit. (The issue is even more technical and has to do with an election administrator’s power to extend a legislative deadline in a presidential election.) For this reason, Democrats would be smart to still do that virtual roll call by Aug. 7 if they’ve coalesced around Vice President Kamala Harris or another candidate. That would avoid even the small risk of a serious lawsuit.

He goes on to discuss at length why their claims of this being undemocratic are so incredibly stupid. I honestly don’t think we even need to discuss it. Coming from these fascist insurrectionists it’s not even worth considering.

They will try, of course because they are shameless assholes. The whole point is to try and muddy the waters with yet another “I know you are but what am I?” piece of nonsense. It won’t work but their delusional cult followers won’t know the difference.

Meme-ifying

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 23, 2024

🥥🌴

The New Republic demystifies the Kamala Harris memes:

Many Harris fans have added the coconut and palm tree emojis to their social media handles, a shorthand for support. Her online supporters self-describe as “coconut-pilled,” much like people who fall down right-wing internet rabbit holes became known as “red-pilled.”

Knowledge of Harris and the coconut tree went from an internet joke to important context in the wake of President Joe Biden’s announcement that he would not seek reelection on Sunday and his endorsement of Harris moments later. Memes are important currency for the terminally online, a population largely comprised of young people who will not be reached by cable advertising or classic campaign mailers. In a political era built on vibes, internet jokes can be as significant as actual campaigning.

The coconut emoji references a now-infamous Harris quote that transformed from an ironic meme to an earnest display of support. In a speech in May last year, Harris quoted her mother. “My mother … would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’” Harris said with a laugh. “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” (The context of the comment—that she was quoting her mother—was lost when a clip of the speech went viral in February.)

The coconut reference is not the only time Harris has achieved meme fame. Another quote from her 2020 presidential campaign has taken on new life in recent weeks: “I can imagine what can be, unburdened by what has been.” Videos have sprouted on TikTok remixing her laugh to popular songs. One recent viral tweet remixed some of Harris’s most memorable quotes to a song by the pop singer Charli XCX. After Charli XCX wrote on X on Sunday that “Kamala IS brat,” a reference to her popular new album, the TikTok page for Harris’s campaign—recently rebranded from being the Biden campaign account—released a video alternating the tweet with “Kamala HQ,” with Charli’s song “Brat” playing in the background.

“The thing about having a candidate people are excited about is that you can actually have fun and be creative on socials, because people are going to embrace it, rather than find it embarrassing,” said Annie Wu Henry, a digital strategist who has overseen social media for Democrats such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator John Fetterman. “People don’t want to feel bad about politics. They want to have fun, they want to enjoy, they want to be excited about a candidate. There can be creativity and community.”

I just met Henry over the weekend at a fundraiser in Raleigh. I hope she’s on the Harris payroll.

Also, “Donald Trump is the joke to young people,” said Marianna Pecora, the communications director for Voters of Tomorrow.

The Lincoln Project gets that too.

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We’ve Got A New Candidate

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 23, 2024

She’s got Trump’s number

How much was sheer dumb luck? Joe Biden might have held to his May 2020 promise to be a “transition” president and bowed out of the 2024 race last year. Democrats might have had a knock-down, drag-out primary season between members of its deep bench of next-generation leaders. The fights might have left the party embittered and weakened going into the fall campaign.

Yes, old party hands helped. They saw handwriting on the wall for the Biden candidacy and convinced him he had to bow out for the good of his party. In late July.

Somehow in spite of themselves, Democrats flipped the script (not in an Aaron Sorkin way) on the 2024 election and turned it from a contest between two, old white men with little curb appeal to one where an energetic, mixed-race, former-prosecutor Democrat faces an aged sexual predator, multiply indicted and convicted, a Republican with dreams of turning the United States into a dictatorship.

Within hours of Biden’s Sunday passing of the baton to his vice president, Kamala Harris, Democrats are unified and reenergized. Harris pulled in $81 million in donations in the first 24 hours, the largest one-day haul in presidential history, anecdotally, many from first-time donors. By Monday night, enough Democratic convention delegates had declared their support for Harris (nonbinding) to nominate her on their first August ballot.

All this without many a pundit’s wet-dream of “a contested convention, blitz primaries, and the like.” It’s not just Stephen Miller who has a sad.

“The first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate is going to be the one who wins this election,” former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley predicted before Republican primary supporters in January.

Talk about dumb luck, a friend told me.

Now there is no joy in MAGAville. Republicans are stuck after massive investments of time and money into running against “Sleepy Joe” with having to rewrite their scripts for a race in which Donald Trump is the faltering old man in obvious decline, and still convicted and indicted. Team MAGA is in panicked disarray.

https://x.com/JeffSharlet/status/1815701315143483545

“I know Donald Trump’s type,” the former prosecutor told her campaign staff Monday afternoon to cheers.

Never Trumper George Conway reduced the current state of play to a simple formula:

I always thought this election is relatively simple. In 2016, Trump won because Hillary became the issue. In 2020, Trump was the incumbent and he was the issue because of his behavior, because of Clorox, because of everything. What happens this year is whoever becomes the issue loses. The problem we were having was that Biden was becoming the issue when Trump needs to be the issue. Now, Trump isn’t going to be able to avoid being the issue… Now, Trump is the old man in the race. Now, after having raised the issue of cognitive decline, he’s the only one that argument applies to.

When Donald Trump spoke of American carnage, he wasn’t promising to fix it but to bring it.

Get back on offense, Democrats. Yes, sell the brownie. “Paint the beautiful tomorrow.” Young voters care about the cost of rents, groceries, and about student loans. Tout what Biden-Harris delivered and what more help is coming for them and their families. But also make Trump the issue. Make Project 2025 the issue. Make Republicans becoming an authoritarian cult bent on taking your freedoms the issue. Women’s freedoms especially, but everyone else’s too. Make what kind of future we want for our country the issue.

#ShesWithUs Now, go kick ass and take names.

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Warrior

Published by digby on July 22, 2024

Thank you President Biden for your service to our country and for having the grace to usher in Kamala Harris to finish the job.

Harris went to campaign headquarters today.

Yes.

The president called in and it was moving: